Chapter 2. 1936–1944: The Metaxas Dictatorship, the Italian Attack, the German Invasion, German Occupation, Resistance

And Then Came the One with the Erased Face

“I remember the bloko [the round-up] very well,” my interlocutor said. “They gathered us all in the square across from your father's house. First, through an interpreter the Germans asked our names. I don't know how they sorted us, because it wasn't alphabetical, it wasn't by age, it wasn't by height—all of us were there, every boy and man of the district. I was fifteen at the time, but my father was there, too, your uncle Tassos, Spyros, Odysseas, Nikos (both of them, actually), everybody. And then the hooded-one came [aftos me tin koukoúla] and started pointing, without saying anything, not a word.”

“Did you know who he was?” I asked.

“Of course I did, everybody did…” he didn't finish the sentence.

“He was the apprentice of the baker, wasn't he?” I asked.

He looked at me in utter surprise. “How do you know this?” he said, “You are too young to know this.”

I said that I had heard it.

“Yes,” he said, “he was the apprentice of the baker, Klémes, down the street from your father's house.”

I knew this story very well, but it was not until the last summer of my research, a few weeks before this encounter took place, that I was told by my father, who was also there during the bloko, who the hooded person was. “He would come around,” my father said, “and he had the hood on, a black one, you could see only his eyes, but he would come around and he would stand in front of us and lean over, close to our faces, and we would whisper to him 'I know you [se xéro].'”

“You didn't want us to buy bread from him because he knew about his apprentice.”

“Nothing of the sort whatsoever,” he said. “I didn't want you do go there because he didn't make good bread; but Klémes was the one who pointed at your uncle and they took him to the camp.”

That was my father's eldest brother, who was picked up by the Gestapo in the bloko at age sixteen and kept in a concentration camp in Athens for a few months. It took my grandmother a few thousand English gold pounds to get him released by the Germans, money that no one knows how she was able to procure. What is remarkable about this story, though, is how this collaborator managed to escape execution later by the OPLA, something that my original interlocutor's father did not.

The brutality of the German occupation cannot be overestimated. Torture and executions were part of daily life. Constant famine forced many Athenians to move to villages in the hope that local orchards would provide them with the rudimentary nutrients that they needed. A division of labor that reconfigured not only gender roles but also understandings of age appeared, as childhood disappeared. Young adolescents would be sent with a wheelbarrow to the area around Athens, to the Mesogeia, or to Eleusis, fifteen, seventeen, twenty kilometers away, to gather dandelions or olives, or to beg for an egg or two, and then return to Athens so that their families could eat. Somewhat older adolescents formed groups called saltadoroi. Five or six of them would accost a German lorry and occupy the driver's attention while others would pilfer as much of the lorry's contents as possible. Sometimes the lorry was carrying food, at other times petrol, at other times spare parts. Anything and everything would be used. Even if these small acts of resistance were not much more than the proverbial fly on the lion's nose, the Germans took them very seriously, and no distinctions were made between the children saltadoroi and the older adolescents who were involved in more systematic and organized resistance. If captured, they were all summarily executed. As one of my interlocutors—a man who grew up to become the headmaster of one of the public high schools in Athens, though not before he was exiled on Yáros at the age of sixteen—told me: “We grew up much too fast.”

On one of those sunless days of that winter, a Saturday morning, cars and motorcycles surrounded Lefteris's small tenement, with the tin windows and the open sewers. And with wild voices ánthropoi with leaden faces and hair straight like straw came. And they ordered all men to gather at the field with the nettles. And they were armed head to toe, the mouths of their guns facing low to the side of the crowd. And a great fright came over the children, as it so happened, almost all of them had some secret in their pocket or their psyche. But there was no other way, and, giving honor to their necessity, [they] took their place in the line, and the ánthropoi with leaden faces, hair straight like straw, and short black shoes unfolded barbed wire around them. And they cut the clouds in two, until sleet started falling, and jaws found it difficult to keep teeth where they belonged, so they would not leave or break.

Then from the other side slowly appeared The One with the Erased Face, who raised a finger and the hours shivered on the large clock of the angels. And whomever he happened to stand in front of, others would grab by the hair and drag on the ground, stepping on him. Until the moment came to stand in front of Lefteris. But he did not move. He only raised his eyes slowly and got them at once so far away—far into his future—and the other felt the jolt and leaned back in danger of falling. And enraged, he made a motion to lift the black cloth from his face so he could spit right onto his face. But Lefteris still did not move.

Right at that moment, the Great Foreigner, the one who was following with three chevrons on his collar, resting his hands on his midriff, sneered: there, he said, there are the men who want to change the course of the world! And without knowing, the poor wretch, that he was speaking the truth, he struck him on the face with his whip three times. For a third time Lefteris did not move. Then, blinded with the little effect that his power had on him, the other one, not knowing what he was doing, pulled out the revolver and blasted him on his right ear.

And the children were very frightened, and the ánthropoi with leaden faces and hair straight as straw and short black shoes turned to wax. Because the shacks came and went, and at places the tar paper fell and there appeared far away, behind the sun, women crying, kneeling on an empty field, full of nettles and black thick blood. While the great clock of the angels struck precisely twelve o'clock.

On February 12, 1943, EAM called the first political strike against conscriptions of forced labor to be sent to Germany, an action that the Germans had taken with the support of the collaborationist government. German forces attacked the strikers and left three dead, but the strike managed to prevent the conscriptions. During the strike EAM announced the formation of Enomeni Panellenia Organose Neon (United Panhellenic Organization of Youth, or EPON) and the armed Organose gia tin Prostasia tou Laikou Agona (Organization for the Protection of Popular Struggle, or OPLA), whose express objective was to protect the members of the Resistance from the militias and paramilitary thug groups, and to expose and punish collaborators.

In Greece at this time, we find a configuration of segmentations like that E. E. Evans-Pritchard describes in The Nuer, namely, differentiation between “age group” and “age set,” where the classification of youth according to age is superceded by classification according to social involvement. The Greek term synomêlikos, meaning “commonly shared age,” deepened to include not only biological age but a radical reconfiguration of social age. In this sense, a “ten-year-old” was a child (in terms of biology) but could very well be counted among Resistance fighters. There has been no study as yet of how age became a fluid marker of socialization in Greece between 1940 and 1950.

Lesley Sharp has convincingly shown the inherent difficulties present when we attempt to produce clearly delineated age demarcations and, more importantly, how problematic the tendency to pathologize different age stages is. Sharp argues that viewing adolescence as a deeply traumatic stage in human emotional development is a culturally informed position by showing that what traumatized adolescents in Madagascar was colonization. See Sharp 2002. What we see in Greece at the time of the war, what the comment of the old Resistance fighter underlines, and what made the sudden muddling of age stages painful and traumatic was the very experience of the war.